The Finish Line

We catch up with Kevin Wedge, General Manager of Pro Powder in South Haven, Michigan, who saw a significant need to automate the facility’s coating line three years ago in order to get better quality and repeatability.

“It was a significant change in culture, attitude, and throughput,” he says. “There were challenges at every stop along the way, and we still see some from time to time today.”

But it was a necessity that Wedge felt had to be done. He had been with Pro Powder for only a few years after owner Carl Kelch had brought him in from outside the finishing industry. In fact, Wedge had come from the pharmaceutical industry and had relatively little experience in the coatings sector, but he knew an efficient operation when he saw one.

Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/powder-coat/1325-pro-powder-uses-process-automation-software-to-improve-efficiency-reduce-costs

Going from a 7,000-square-foot powder coating operation to a 70,000-square-foot facility isn’t something done overnight, and managing it doesn’t get any easier.

Just ask Kevin Maas and his brother, Kraig, owners of Maas Brothers Powder Coating in Livermore, California, just outside of San Francisco.

“It’s been a slow progression,” Kevin says. “We started in 1998, and 10 years later, we moved into the space we have now, so it’s been a journey.”

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/powder-coat/1307-maas-brothers-powder-coating-s-70k-sf-facility-looks-to-grow

When Stephen Rudy CEF was getting close to retirement several years ago, he began wondering what he would do to keep himself busy.

“I asked myself about nine months before I retired, ‘What are you going to do with your time?’” says Rudy, who started his own company, Chem Analytic, which offers wet analysis of metal finishing solutions, hull cell plating test and evaluation, and training services for the plating industry.

With a 40+ year career in the finishing industry, Rudy has seen — and solved — many issues that occur in plating operations,

For more than 40 years, Terry Giles has crisscrossed the U.S. and the world not only working to install better coating systems for major OEMs for Henkel, but also educating others in the industry through talks and presentations.

Now retired, Giles has held various positions while at Henkel, including research chemist, technical service manager, sales and marketing. His last position before retiring in 2019 was Global Business Development Manager, where he was responsible for introducing Henkel products to a variety of manufacturing industries, including pretreatment and ecoat systems

We chat with Andrew Kossowski, who three years ago  left the corporate world behind to buy a metal finishing operation. This year, he is building himself a new one.

In 2020, Kossowski and his wife, Sydney, retired from their careers and decided to purchase DHS Enterprises in Clearwater, Florida. The 5,000-square foot facility — which they have renamed Veterans Metal — was an all-manually-operated finisher specializing in Type II anodize, Type I and II chem film, and Type 2, 6, and 7 stainless steel passivate.

This year, they are building from scratch a $2.6 million, 15,000-square-foot facility in Largo with nearly all new equipment and fixtures just a few miles down the road. Kossowski says it was time to modernize the operation.

“It’s a shop that is very long in the tooth, but it has great potential and a good customer following as well,” he says. “Those customers wanted more, but the previous owner really didn’t want more, and he was happy where it was. But I definitely want to take it to the next level.”

John Heyer will be the first to admit that he took a job in the coatings industry simply because he needed a job back in the early 1970s.

But what he did with that opportunity led him to a remarkable career that included finally owning the company he went to work for, as well as decades of activism in industry trade associations that culminated in being inducted into the Powder Coating Institute's Hall of Fame this year.

"It's a career I look back on with very fond memories," says Heyer, who is now retired from Kettle Moraine Coatings in Jackson, Wisconsin. "My business in the finishing industry is what provided the income for our family and put food on the table for over 40 years. Beyond that, it has been a great experience getting to know and interact with all the wonderful people in our industry."

Read our Legends interview with John at http://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/powder-coat/1144-legends-john-heyer-kettle-moraine-coatings-ret

Paul Springer was fresh out of college in the early 1970s and enjoying a career at Diamond Shamrock, where he helped create Dacromet, one of the first products that used a zinc and chromium coating application.

“I had a pretty good job there,” he says. “I enjoyed what I was doing.”

But his tennis party in those days, George Kappas Sr. from Erieview Metal Treating in Cleveland, kept telling Springer he didn’t seem that happy in his work. He encouraged him to look for a change of scenery and maybe even strike out on his own as an owner of a finishing and coating operation.

“I thought he was crazy,” says Springer, the owner of SpringCo Metal Coating. “I was in the lab. I didn’t even know what a business owner did.”

Forty-five years later, SpringCo provides several coating services, including electrocoating, powder coating, rack zinc plating, and phosphating on a sprawling 11-acre site with a 250,000-square-foot facility in Cleveland.

Frank Altmayer always wanted to be an architect, but a change of direction became a benefit for the finishing industry.

“I graduated from high school in Chicago and was hoping to be an architect, but things didn’t work out too well,” Altmayer says. “My mom told me to get a job, so I signed up with an employment agency, and they found me a job at Scientific Control Laboratories.”

Years later, Altmayer went on to own SCL and has been a mentor and instructor for many in the finishing industry for many years to follow.

Altmayer is a Master Surface Finisher and an AESF Fellow who is the technical education director of the AESF Foundation and NASF, as well as the most recent edition of FinishingAndCoating.com’s Legend series.

He owned Scientific Control Laboratories from 1986 to 2007 and has 45 years of experience in metal finishing.

Decades into a career as a metal finisher, chemical, and equipment salesperson, Marko Duffy can now add a new title to his resume: matchmaker.

After 25 years working in shops, five years working for a supplier, and 10 years running his own sales business, Duffy now finds himself running an electroplating shop in Danvers, Massachusetts, near his hometown.

TDF Metal Finishing named Duffy its managing director in 2021 after the company was bought by Phenna Group from the United Kingdom. Phenna also owns Hansen Aerospace, which is also in Danvers and specializes in nondestructive testing and has the largest independently-owned immersion ultrasonic facility in the world.

Read the article here: https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1136-tdf-metal-finishing-meets-its-match-in-marko-duffy

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be sending a PFAS questionnaire to electroplaters to collect data for the agency’s planned revision of the metal finishing and electroplating guidelines.

Attorney Ethan Ware is one of the foremost experts on environmental law and has sound advice for any of the 1,815 shops in the U.S. that the EPA will send the survey to determine their effluent discharge for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).